Robot Wars Development Diary: customisation scene

25 March 2018

Categories: C++ | ASGE

Myself and another member of my team are working on the customisation scene for the robots.

We must have:

  • Stats showing and adapting depending on what equipment is equipped
  • Ability to change body, weapon and wheel types
  • Sprites for all of the above
  • "Ready" button

We would like to have:

  • Customisable name for each robot
  • Recolour options

Layout

As our team have chosen on each player having three robots each, the robot customisation scene will have three panels, with a ready button.

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Functionality

The robots will be customisable with different bodies, weapons and wheels which will update as the player cycles through with the arrows. The stats will update dynamically dependent on which components the player has chosen.

Saving the robots

When the player clicks 'ready' and loads into the game, the robots will be saved in a text file which will then be read in game to load them correctly. This will all be client side and the same will go for player 2.

Implementation

Using a scene manager implemented by another team member, we created a robot customisation scene with three panels (scene nodes).

These panels held arrows, the robots, and their respective components and statistics. The sprites for each component were stored in an array of strings (for the directories). The position in the array the game reads from corresponds to the sprite to load. To then save the player's selection, it saves the data to a text file. The code below demonstrates this:

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